Monday, October 10, 2016

That’s
“slam” as in “poetry slam” but it’s also “slam” as in “the slammer,” and this
1998 film that won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (the award for Best
first feature) and the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic film at Sundance invests
considerable energy in both of those locales. Slam tells the story of Ray Joshua (played by the charismatic Saul
Williams), a resident of the projects near Washington D.C. who writes rhymes in
his spare time but has no specific aspiration to do anything more than write
and remain a low-level drug dealer to make ends meet.

Finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong
time, he winds up going to jail, accused of murder, and here the film takes
off. Where prior to this we’ve seen him as a gentle soul in a rough area –
several early scenes find him reciting his poetry to the neighborhood children
and encouraging them to create their own work – he’s suddenly thrown into a
very hard situation. As he’s being processed he quickly gets the lowdown on the
harsh realities of prison life as he’s brought into the system. The lawyer assigned
to his case lays out the options – none of them remotely fair – and sums up his
situation with the brutal, direct lines “you’re a victim, brother. You’re
black, you’re young, you come from Southeast, you’re in the inner city. You
don’t have a chance.” This scene is followed immediately by a similar one with
a prison guard laying out statistics of incarcerated black men in the D.C. area
and bluntly telling him that he has no friends inside and that he will stay
alive only if he keeps his head down and minds his own business. But it’s not
all hopeless – after a time negotiating the clutches of rival prison gangs he
finds that his words help him out of a sticky situation and into a writing
class taught by Lauren Bell (played by Sonja Sohn), who recognizes his talent
and encourages him, when he is released, to seek out the slam poetry scene
where she’s found her own shot of redemption.

After a deus
ex machina gets Ray back on the streets, he spends time with Bell, learning
about her own hard past and how she’s used it as material for her present as a
teacher and poet and helped vault herself out of the traps in which she had
found herself. He’s inspired by her scene and her story – and her. And as the
film works toward its climactic poetry reading – how often can you say that
this is where the dramatic thrust of a film is pointed? – it dances around the
complications of their relationship. What happens if he ends up back in prison
on the charges leveled against him? What if he doesn’t? Is she ready to engage
in a serious relationship with him? It’s here that the film invests the least
of its energy, perhaps because it knew that to make the relationship scenes as
serious, as realistic as its prison and poetry scenes it would have to believe
in them the way it does in those. And maybe it doesn’t, but it smartly avoids
the inherent problems by keeping them ambiguous and offering no easy solutions,
even while its optimism and belief in the power of art remain the engine that
powers the film.

The film moves from one strength to another, its
earnestness worn guilelessly on its sleeve as it transitions from the hard
realism of the prison sequence to the documentary vibe of the later poetry
slams. And Williams is magnetic throughout, both in his street/gang persona
earlier and believable as a man transformed by poetry in the film’s later
scenes. Director Marc Levin keeps things simple and mostly lets his actors and
the script he co-wrote with Williams (and three others) do the talking – and
he’s rewarded with superb performances from Williams and Sohn especially,
though other characters filling out the film (many of them acquaintances of
Williams through the slam scene) have their shining moments as well. The film
is smart in its avoidance of easy answers, it avoids clichéd character
progressions and conflicts (even if it sometimes feels less believable as a
result – I doubt poetry could end inter-prison conflicts or gang warfare outside)
and it knows what its strengths are and puts its energies there to create a
bracing, entertaining, and even inspirational film.